Research Rapture? It’s what happens when a history mystery is handed to your historian correspondent and time and resources allow hours of delving into facts and figures. I was given a typewritten list of 114…
Posts published in “Essays”
When it comes to areas of the world being racked by drought, one of the few that has had at least as hard a time as California is central and southern Brazil. Whereas the US's…
It’s commonly believed that more than 20,000 people are buried under Washington Square Park, used as a cemetery and home to freed slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The baroque density of Thomas Pynchon’s novels for half-a-century has dissuaded filmmakers from trying to turn any of them into movies. Paul Thomas Anderson’s valiant—or perhaps just plain crazy—cinematic confrontation with Inherent Vice is the…
Mike owns Hobo Guitars in Ukiah. He has been a working musician all his life while also building and repairing guitars and other musical instruments.
I wish that I had me some danged Internet up in here so I could ask it who thought up this business about the world being an oyster and what the hell he meant by…
Back in late March of 2014 the Fort Bragg City Council held a hearing to consider a resolution authorizing an application for a $2 million community development block grant (CDBG) that would have gone toward…
My first few weeks living at Waldo Point made me realize that I wasn’t going anywhere else anytime soon. I liked hanging out on the Sausalito waterfront, meeting Becker’s friends and neighbors, mostly boat people,…
“All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.” Yes, those were the words spoken by a man who was Governor of California and President of the United States, a man revered by millions of People With Small Brains. I stumbled upon that example of Reagan’s snotty idiocy while hunting for cogent things people have said about waste, and though Reagan was rarely cogent—and the world might be a better place had he, in his youth, sat for a few hours at a desk under which was stored a year’s waste from a nuclear power plant—his remark struck me as an apt preamble to the problem I want to discuss with you.